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The Country-life Movement in the United States
The Country-life Movement in the United States Author:Liberty Hyde Bailey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: question of education as to how long any family can establish itself on a piece of land. In the accelerating mobility of our civilization it is increasingly i... more »mportant that we have many anchoring places; and these anchoring places are the farms. These two phases of society produce marked results in ways of doing business. The great centers invite combinations, and, because society has not kept pace with guiding and correcting measures, immense abuses have arisen and the few have tended to fatten on the many. There are two general modes of correcting, or at least of modifying, these abuses,— by doing what we can to make men personally honest and responsible, and by evening up society so that all men may have something like a natural opportunity. The two minds. There is a town mind and a country mind. I do not pretend to know what may be the' psychological processes, but it is clear that the mode of approach to the problem of life is very different as between the real urbanite and the real ruralite. This factor is not sufficiently taken into account by city men who would remove to real farms and make a living there. . It is the cause of most of the failure of well- intentioned social workers to accomplish much for country people. All this is singularly reflected in our literature, and most of all, perhaps, in guide-books. These books — made to meet the demand — illustrate how completely the open country has been in eclipse. There is little rural country discoverable in these books, unless it is mere "sights" or "places," — nothing of the people, of the lands, of the products, of the markets, of the country dorfs, of the way of life; but there is surfeit of cathedrals, of history of cities, of seats of famous personages, of bridges and streets, of galleries and works...« less